Starting with this issue, I'm using MakeAShorterLink.com to shorten very
long URLs. It's a useful service, elegantly implemented. This will
prevent the wrapping of long URLs, which in some applications prevents users
from clicking through. I hope it saves you from cutting and pasting.

A web log (or weblog, hence blog) is a chronological list of the editor's
postings with the most recent on top. Typically a blog shows only a week's
worth on one screen, with the rest in a searchable archive. Some blogs are
individual diaries, some are devoted to news in a certain niche, some are like
newsletters published one date-stamped item at a time. Some blogs are
produced by one individual and some have many contributors. All are
free. There is now intuitive software to make blogs easy to create and
maintain.

If you haven't used blogs to follow developments in a certain corner of the
world (electronic publishing, libraries, you name it), you're in for a pleasant
surprise. They've become very useful tools.

The useful blogs today tend to cover news in some fairly narrow
professional beat, political bloc, or product market. But there's no
reason why they couldn't cover news in a scholarly discipline.

Two good examples of scholarly blogs are GeoBlog, maintained by Fred
Siewers, and the Biological Science blog from the BigBlog family of blogs.
When there is news of interest to geologists or biologists, these blog editors
log a note with a link. Geologists or biologists can visit the sites
periodically to see what's going on. Both blogs cover both popular and
scholarly sources (and both could enrich the mix with more scholarly
sources). Both are useful to working scientists and should inspire
imitators in other fields.

In the back of my mind, one of my models here is John Baez, professor of
mathematics at the University of California, Riverside. Baez reads current
journal articles in mathematical physics and cross-posts his summaries and
thoughts to four usenet newsgroups (sci.physics.research, sci.math.research,
sci.physics, and sci.math). He's been doing this nearly every week for
more than three years. He doesn't run a blog, but anybody willing to do
what he's doing could make a terrific blog. Why doesn't every field have a
John Baez (or two, or ten), reading current articles and posting summaries and
thoughts to a blog for other researchers in the field?

(Sic this alert service on a blog to be notified by email when it is
updated.)

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Adobe says "licensed", court says "sold"

Softman Products runs BuyCheapSoftware.com, a web site that unbundles Adobe
software "Collections" and sells the pieces separately. This enables
buyers to buy, install, and use the individual programs without seeing or
clicking assent to Adobe's licensing agreement. When Adobe found out about
this practice, it sued Softman for infringing its trademarks and
copyrights. In August a federal district court issued a temporary
restraining order against Softman, but in October it lifted the order and ruled
that Softman is acting within its rights as a purchaser.

The case is about software, not scholarship, but many of the court's
arguments extend to scholarly texts and other forms of intellectual
property. The court ruled that Adobe "sold" copies of its software to
Softman and didn't merely "license" them. The fact that Adobe used
licensing language to describe the transaction is irrelevant. What matters
is the substance of the transaction itself. Softman paid full value for
the software; Softman accepted the risk that it would be damaged or lost; and
Softman accepted the risk that it would be unable to resell it. These are
the hallmarks of a sale.

Adobe didn't sell its intellectual property, but it did sell copies.
Adobe's insistence that it owns the intellectual property is therefore beside
the point. If Softman bought copies of the software from Adobe and didn't
merely license them, then it has the right to dispose of them in any way that it
sees fit. In short, the "first sale doctrine" applies to copies of Adobe
software.

Quoting Judge Pregerson: "Adobe seeks to control the resale of a
lawfully acquired copy of its software. Adobe’s position in this action
would be more akin to a journalist who claimed that ownership of the copyright
to an article allowed him or her to control the resale of a particular copy of a
newspaper that contained that article."

* Postscript. What if this ruling stands and is applied to scholarly
texts? If libraries and consumers are held to "buy" rather than "license"
ebooks, ejournals, and ejournal articles, then they should be within their
rights to bypass copy protection, make back-up copies, make copies to run on
their other computers, and keep their copies in readable form (tweaked if
necessary) in perpetuity without further payments.

* PPS. In trying to find more details and commentary on this case, I
hit the news and law search engines. But even though stories and op-ed
pieces on the case could be old enough to be crawled by the major engines (and
certainly by the frequently refreshed news engines), I've found nothing.
Why is the nerd press ignoring this far-reaching story?

----------

Freedom from cross-border censorship

A federal district court ruled on November 7 that Yahoo's U.S. web
operations are not bound by French law on the sale of Nazi artifacts, even
though Yahoo auction pages are served to French citizens.

The French argued that a French ruling ought to be binding over what French
citizens may see in France. Yahoo argued that a U.S. company's U.S. web
site should be protected by the U.S. constitution.

To understand why this is good news for FOS, imagine that your online
scholarship about evolution, Chinese history, or sexuality, was enjoined by
courts in Iran, China, or Afghanistan. (See FOSN for 7/3/01.) The
principle behind this case helps all scholars who publish controversial papers
on the web --or at least the 99% for whom there is at least one country on Earth
more oppressive and intolerant than their own.

(The court has not yet posted its own version of the text. This copy
was scanned by the Center for Democracy and Technology.)

Amicus brief for Yahoo submitted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,
Commercial Internet Exchange Association, Information Technology Association of
America, U.S. Internet Industry Association, Online Publishers Association, and
the U.S. Council for International Business

In earlier issues, we've worried about the commercial exploitation of FOS
(see FOSN for 7/17/01 and 8/7/01). If you put content online for free for
readers, then it's also free for commercial publishers or any other for-profit
vendor who wants to take up your content, repackage it, perhaps with add-ons,
and sell it.

Now commercial providers are worried about the inverse problem. If
they put up content supported by advertising or subscription fees, then (as long
as it isn't hidden behind passwords) it will be copied and made available free
of charge by Google's cache system (FOSN for 10/12/01) or the Wayback Machine's
internet archive (FOSN for 10/26/01).

There's an interesting symmetry here. Free content can be repackaged
and sold by commercial publishers. Priced content can be repackaged and
given away by FOS providers.

Here are two differences that break the symmetry. First, when free
content has been repackaged for purchase, and when priced content has been
repackaged for free distribution, then most users will prefer the free versions
of both kinds of content. Or at least it would take significant add-ons to
persuade users to buy content they could get for free. This is the
asymmetry that will help FOS in the long run. If we can convert lead to
gold and gold to lead, most people will prefer gold.

Second, Google and the Wayback Machine let commercial providers tag their
sites so that they are not cached or archived. Hence, commercial providers
can stop free distribution at their own initiative, but there is no comparable
step that FOS providers can take to stop commercial exploitation. They can
copyright their content and refuse permission to reprint it for profit.
But this requires monitoring, negotiation, confrontation, and lawsuits, not just
a metatag.

Copyright helps each side symmetrically block the other. Clearly FOS
providers can use copyright to stop commercial exploitation. For the other
direction, see Katharine Mieszkowski's November 2 article for _Salon_, in which
she speculates on the copyright and other legal troubles that might arise for
the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Online newspapers that charge for
access to back issues will soon find that the Wayback Machine gives free online
access to all. "The testy members of the National Writers Union
[vindicated by the Supreme Court in _Tasini_] may also view the archive as an
unauthorized and uncompensated republishing of their work. There's also
the tricky question of what happens if a settlement in a lawsuit requires that
libelous material be removed from a Web site, yet the original lives on in the
archive?"

* The entire population of Iceland now has a license to access over 2,000
electronic journals from six publishers. (PS: This an interesting
hybrid. It's unfree in the obvious sense that Iceland paid money for the
national license. But for Icelanders, it's government subsidized, like
NASA's Astrophysics Data System, the National Library of Medicine, and much
other content that Americans call FOS.)

* Ingenta, which calls itself the world's largest online database of
scientific literature, has become profitable sooner than expected. Its
revenue comes from fees paid by publishers for electronic versions of their
print journals, and from fees paid by readers to download articles.
Ingenta-funded research shows that "by switching to online distribution,
publisher royalties and revenue could increase by 38%" --presumably by not
passing the savings on to subscribers.

* The California Digital Library (CDL) will discontinue its version of
Medline on December 19. The CDL version was originally called Melvyl
Medline Plus and, more recently, CDL Medline/HealthSTAR. After December
19, CDL users will access Medline through PubMed.

* The new USA PATRIOT Act allows secret searches, not only of your home and
office but of your library borrowing records. These searches can be secret
in the sense that the authorities need not tell you that the search ever took
place. The American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom,
in consultation with the Freedom to Read Foundation, has put together legal
advice for librarians who are served with subpoenas to turn over the borrowing
records of patrons without informing those patrons.

* The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) harnesses the spare
desktop CPU cycles of thousands of volunteers to create a massively parallel
virtual computer for scientific computations. But now post-terrorist
paranoia may limit the effectiveness of this exciting technology. Swedish
Public Radio has banned the software from its machines because there's no way to
tell what job the computations are really performing. It might be the
scientific search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, or it might be a
terrorist's calculation of missile ballistics.

* The source code for the Digital Document Discourse Environment (D3E) is
now available for downloading. D3E is an open source program which creates
a threaded discussion attached to any web page. It's easy to set up and
use and a natural for integrating discussion with any online article or book or
for experimenting with new forms of interactive peer review. "Full D3E"
uses a toolkit to insert navigation links and discussion hooks into the target
document. "Ubiquitous D3E" (which is new) uses unmodified files in their
natural habitat on the web. D3E discussions support multiple threads,
moderators, discussion subscription, searching, email delivery, HTML within
posts, look and feel control, usage statistics, and other standard features of
major discussion forums. D3E is a collaboration of the Knowledge Media
Institute of the UK's Open University and the Center for LifeLong Learning &
Design of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

* The Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) was originally launched
in 1996 as a free online archive of engineering reports, articles, and
data. This week it was relaunched with a wider scope that includes
mathematics and computing. The new name is the Internet Guide to
Engineering, Mathematics, and Computing, though it still goes by its old
acronym, EEVL. It has one of the most flexible search engines I've seen in
a content portal. You can search the entire archive or limit your search
to any of its many topical sub-sections. You can limit searches by
discipline, by resource type, or by national origin. You can search the
full-texts of the archived articles, or limit the search to authors, titles,
URLs, or descriptions. EEVL is the joint product of a handful of British
universities with funds from JISC.

* The proceedings of the August workshop in Atlanta, "Managing Digital
Video Content" are now online. For most of the talks, the site includes
the speaker's PowerPoint presentation and a RealVideo clip of the talk.

* The proceedings of the October JISC seminar, Digital Curation: Digital
Archives, Libraries, and E-Science, are now online. These consist of a
couple of RTF documents and many PowerPoint presentations.

* The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has started compiling a
systematic collection of censorship incidents traceable to the patriotism and
counter-terrorism inspired by the September 11 attacks. The archive has a
section devoted to academic incidents, but the whole collection is still very
new and hasn't caught up with half the incidents I've read about. I assume
it will grow.

If you can't wait for the NCAC archive to grow, see the archive from EFF
mentioned in FOSN for 10/26/01. While the NCAC's collection covers all
kinds of anti-terrorist censorship, the EFF collection is limited to the
censorship of web sites.

* The National Academies' Committee on Intellectual Property Rights in the
Knowledge-Based Economy would like your comments on the papers from several past
conferences that it has posted to its web site.

* Gerry Mckiernan would welcome any news about "current or planned efforts
for organizing or providing enhanced access to Internet or Web resources" for
his "News from the Field" column for the _Journal of Internet Cataloging_
(JIC). Send news items to <gerrymck [at] iastate.edu>.

----------

In other publications

* In the November 6 _Chronicle of Higher Education_, Jeffrey Young
interviews Corynne McSherry, author of _Academic Work: Battling for
Control of Intellectual Property_ (Harvard UP, 2001). McSherry sees a deep
conflict between copyright law, which is about the exchange of commodities, and
academic life, which is about the exchange of gifts. Her book won
Harvard's 2001 Thomas J. Wilson prize for the best first book accepted this
year.

Jeffrey Young, Law Student Warns That Professors' Quest for Rights to
Lectures Could Backfire

(This is the full-text of the book. Does anyone have details on when
Harvard provides free online full-text of its books and when it
doesn't?)

* Lawrence Lessig has just published _The Future of Ideas: The Fate
of the Commons in a Connected World_ (Random House, October 30, 2001), a
critique of the direction of copyright law with specific recommendations on how
legislatures can protect the future of ideas.

* Rory Litwin, maintainer of the Library Juice weblog, has written a
manifesto that attempts to capture what he calls the Library Spirit.
Libraries' "combination of economic communitarianism and social/intellectual
libertarianism creates the ideal support system for a democratic society,
because the library provides everyone with access to ideas and provides access
to every idea."

Rory Litwin, The Ideology of Librarianship: A Libertarian Socialism
of Information

* The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the First Amendment Project
(FAP) have issued a joint press release on the California decision vindicating
DeCSS and declaring that source code is protected by the First Amendment (see
FOSN for 11/2/01). The press release was issued November 1, but last week
the link was dead.

* If you remember, in June the small ebook publisher Rosetta Books defeated
Random House in the Supreme Court and established the principle that
then-standard book contracts did not cover electronic publication. As a
result, Rosetta Books won the right to publish electronic versions of books
whose print versions were under contract to Random House. (See FOSN for
7/17/01.) Simon & Schuster shares Random House's interest in this case
and this week showed its solidarity by squelching a deal to distribute
books from a third firm, iBooks, when it found out that iBooks had struck a
co-publishing deal with Rosetta Books.

* If you were intrigued by R2 Consulting's dynamic map of the ebook
business (see FOSN for 8/23/01), then you'll be glad to know that software for
building your own dynamic knowledge maps is now available for the desktop ($299
retail).

* In the last issue, I reviewed the background of Eddy van der Maarel's
resignation from _Vegetatio_ in order to launch the _Journal of Vegetative
Science_ (JVS). At the time I mailed the issue, his editorial in JVS 1.1,
explaining the background in his own words was only accessible online to paying
subscribers. Now Opulus Press has made it freely available. Thank
you, Opulus Press.

* Since 1998, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) has been hard
at work. It is scanning clay tablets, on each of their six faces, and
putting the digital images online for students and scholars. In the next
few years CDLI will contain scans of 60,000 clay tablets, with special strength
in the period 3200-2000 BCE. Over time it plans to capture the 200,000
known tablets housed in museums throughout the world. CDLI will
revolutionize Assyriology, whose scholars have had to travel from museum to
museum to read the physical tablets, or from library to library to read the
40,000 images already published in books and journals. The CDLI is a joint
venture of the University of California at Los Angeles and the Max Planck
Institute for the History of Science, and has received funding from the NSF and
NEH.

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